


Shut Up For a Second - Merry Christmas

by Fox_the_Clever_Turnip



Series: Dusk & Roan [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Christmas Tree, Gen, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:26:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2844506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fox_the_Clever_Turnip/pseuds/Fox_the_Clever_Turnip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dusk follows through with his Christmas plans for Roan. Clones on the run on an evacuated planet have to get creative, but Dusk makes due.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shut Up For a Second - Merry Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> Dusk and Roan again. I kind of like them. Dusk is a bitter little shit, but he's decent when it matters. Once again, a spin-off of the Cloneverse.

It has to be perfect. I’ve let Roan down so often since we left “home,” and it isn’t fair to him. It was my idea to run, but he came along only to protect me. I may not have approved of his life with Amelie and the Conclave, but it was _his_ life, and he had a right to it. Still, he gave it up for me—three meals a day, protection, warmth, a crazy-cult-bitch mother figure. Even for me, that sounds sort of appealing, but I just couldn’t justify doing the things they do to people; making clones “better.” Clones were made to make _people_ “better.” I didn’t want it, but Roan felt at home there.

So, here were are. Nowhere permanent, but still with a roof over our heads. During our run from Amelie, we’ve stayed in all sorts of places, from makeshift tents in the woods to abandoned warehouses to run down motels. Believe it or not, a lot of places, even seventy years after the mass exodus of humankind, are still fairly functional. A little gross, maybe, but able to be slept in.

Now, when I say “it,” I mean the room. We’re in this little house I chose when we were traipsing through the suburbs of some shithole town in New Jersey. Really, the suburbs were peaceful, I guess, it’s the actual town that was a shithole. Or, it was at one time. _Everything_ is more or less a shithole now. I want it to be perfect, though, regardless. I picked it because it was a house and not a rotted out convenience store or fast food joint. Someone had a home here once.

Let’s be clear, I have no delusions that we’ll ever be able to permanently settle _anywhere_ , not with things as they are. We’re always running, always trying to stay a step ahead of other people. I hear they have settlements now peppering the whole east coast, where people actually have lives. There’s commerce and community and rudimentary lifestyles that, in no way, match up to what we left behind, but it was… something. Maybe even something better.

If Roan and I took up in one of these places, we’d bring a world of trouble for everyone who lived there. It wouldn’t be fair. That, or we’d be run out. Clones aren’t exactly thought well of.

Again, I want it to be perfect. Roan will be back any minute from his scouting adventure—which was always kind of funny, honestly, because, you know, scouting for _what?_ The world was pretty well picked clean, and there was no longer that cut-throat, kill-or-be-killed mentality that seemed to prevalent in the beginning. Anyway, he runs off now and then to make sure the surrounding area is safe, see if he can find anything useful for us, and make himself feel better about being in absolute control of our situation. He’s a complicated guy.

It’s been a long time since the evacuation, and things have certainly rotted and crumbled to a certain degree, there’s no question, but you know what lasts for-fucking-ever? Plastic. Really the shittiest processed thing we as a culture have put on this planet, but those of us who were left behind? We’re really grateful for the opportunity to have shit that doesn’t fall apart after ten years.

So. Plastic. It’s not exactly a Douglas fir, but Roan wants Christmas, so I raided four houses on this street until I found a collection of Christmas stuff. Trees and foil-painted bulbs and handmade ornaments from little kids. The handmade ones were mostly that flour and water shit kids put their handprints in and drawn-on plastic and glass. The paper ones were unrecognizable. Too bad, really. I think they would add a nice touch.

I dragged the tree back to the house, sparks flying from the metal base as it scraped along the uneven pavement. Good thing I didn’t disturb the neighbors. Box by box, I carried and slid them all over to this house where they’re sitting in the living room, waiting for my plan of attack. I don’t have one. I’ve never decorated a Christmas tree before, and I’m really just grateful I got the thing here in one piece. It’s lopsided and kind of a gross shade of dark green—probably a combination of mold and dust—and smells just a little weird, but I shake it off as best as I can, and set the thing up in the living room. There’s nothing _in_ the house anymore, really, so it’s just a tree in a room, but it’ll do.

Next, I go through the boxes, tossing what’s gross or won’t work and hanging the rest all over the tree. It’s messy. The ornaments are faded and aging and the garland is a crinkly mess of knotted up foil frills, but it’s sort of charming in a make-shift way, I guess.

It takes me about an hour to get everything that looked salvageable onto the tree, though there was no way to put the lights on. They wouldn’t have worked anyway, and the whole tree would have burst into flames or something. No great loss—well, no, that’s not true. This night has to go well, and _then_ it can all burst into flames. That hour, though, I don’t think I’ve ever worked so painstakingly at anything in my entire goddamn life. My ugly tree is set. So, I pin up the rest of the garland and stick bows all over the damn place until I feel like the room is Christmasy enough.

“Hey, Dusk!” Roan’s voice rips a gasp from me, and I spin around to see him in the doorway, empty-handed and gaping. “W-What’s all this…?”

I stand a little straighter. “Christmas.”

“Christmas?”

“Yeah. It’s tomorrow, isn’t it? So, that makes this Christmas Eve, yeah?” I shift nervously, and turn to my display. “Do you hate it?”

“No!” Roan chokes, and his chest hits my back like a ton of bricks, and I laugh. I was worried. “No, it’s amazing. Shit, Dusk… where did you get all of this stuff?”

“Houses around the neighborhood. Just… things people left behind. Kind of sad, I guess,” I say as I lean back into him. “You said you wanted a real Christmas, so here it is.”

His arms tighten around my middle and he rubs his stubbly cheek against mine. I’ve never been good at growing facial hair—it comes in all patchy. Roan’s face could fluff out a beard in twenty minutes if he thought hard enough about it. I kind of like the bristles. “It’s fucking perfect. Thank you.”

Beaming, I turn and grab him by the front of his shirt. “Here. I found this, too.” I point up and Roan’s eyes follow my finger to a plastic mistletoe haphazardly tied to a crooked ceiling fan blade. It was the only one left attached to the center bit.

With a grin, Roan leans in to kiss me, but I stop him, hand on the lower half of his face to block his descent. “Wait.”

“Rlllm rmmntic,” he mumbled through my palm.

“Yeah, I know, shut up.” I let his face go and slide my arms around his waist. “I work really hard to show you how important you are to me, compensate for the fact I’m an emotional moron.”

“You _do—.”_

“Shut up for a second,” I huff. “I know that I do things that are weird, like this. I mean, who raids basements and garages of abandoned homes for Christmas decorations? That’s weird. Point is… I try hard, but I get that it’s not enough, that it can’t fix everything. So… merry Christmas, Roan. I love you.” That was hard, but I mean it. Every word.

And, on cue, Roan gets choked up and swallows hard, his eyes brimming a bit. He’s such a teddy bear when it comes to this kind of thing. You’d never guess he knows fifty ways to kill a man slowly with a pen cap.

“I love you, too,” he manages, and finally goes in for that kiss. I don’t block him this time and meet his lips firmly. “I got exactly what I asked for,” he grinned.

“You deserve it. You deserve everything, Roan. It’s hard for me to say it, but I mean it. Merry Christmas,” I say, stealing another kiss under that mistletoe.

“You forgot the star.”

“What?” I blink, looking around frantically.

“On the tree. A star goes on the top.” He points and snickers.

I sigh. “You’re lucky I love you, Roan, I fucking swear.”

“Merry Christmas, Dusk.” Another kiss.

Yeah, merry Christmas. Ass.


End file.
